The Brontë Parsonage Museum was recently awarded £50000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund to support an exciting programme of developments that will take place at the museum in January 2010. This blog is a forum for people in and around Haworth to keep up to date with the project, and make comments and suggestions

Thursday, 27 August 2009

HLF Local Community Consultation Projects

The free local residents day on Saturday 8 August was a great success with 270 local people taking advantage of the offer, almost half of whom were first time visitors to the museum. We also had a good response to the visitor survey which took place on the day. We asked residents some quite detailed questions about their experience at the Parsonage, and we'd like to thank everyone for their patience in responding!

We were obviously pleased to find that most residents rated highly the content of the museum and would visit again; we were equally interested in discovering what they felt worked less well, as well as what they particularly enjoyed and what they would like to see more of. The information that we gained from this survey is the first step towards our goal of ensuring that the redevelopment taking place at the museum will be responsive to these ideas and opinions of local residents.

Here are some examples of the suggestions we recieved

"Would like to see more about the village and conditions and the early Bronte Society"

"It would be nice to read more reviews of the novels as published at the time"

"People dressed in period costume"

"More details of where they walked and how they travelled about in general"

Remember if you are intersested in having a more in depth opportunity to give us your input and are able to attend either of our residents evenings on 15 and 23 September, please contact Andrew McCarthy on andrew.mccarthy@bronte.org.uk